The revelation that wealthy foreigners once paid to turn Sarajevo’s besieged streets into a hunting ground has ripped open a fresh wound in the Bosnian War’s already brutal legacy. A former Bosnian Army intelligence analyst and a former Sarajevo mayor have now testified that an organised “human‑safari” sold lives for cash, prompting an Italian homicide probe and a wave of cross‑border legal manoeuvring that could finally bring some of the most grotesque crimes of the 1990s to trial.
Almir Husić, who served in Bosnian Army intelligence, tells investigators that his unit warned Italy’s secret service in late 1993 of at least five Italian nationals poised to join sniper tours that targeted civilians. Former mayor Alija Behmen corroborates the claim, describing a chilling price list that valued children highest, then men in uniform, women and finally the elderly – the latter allegedly killed “for free”. The series Sniper Safari (also broadcast as The Sarajevo Hunting Club) lays out these details in stark, documentary form, and its broadcast in November 2025 forced the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office to open an investigation for aggravated intentional homicide on 10 November 2025.
Yet the drama remains largely testimonial. The documentary offers no new forensic artefacts – no GPS‑derived sniper‑position maps, no ballistics matches, no DNA‑identified remains from mass graves. Its power lies solely in the credibility of Husić and Behmen and the alleged SISMI warning that could be retrieved from diplomatic archives. Without material evidence, prosecutors will have to lean heavily on these witness statements to satisfy the evidentiary thresholds required in both Italian courts and any future referrals to the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) in The Hague.
A companion series, Sarajevo Safari, adds a personal anecdote: an ex‑U.S. Marine claims he paid US$90,000 to join a sniper tour and fire at civilian targets. The programme provides no documentary or forensic corroboration, limiting its legal impact to keeping the “human‑safari” narrative in the public eye. Unlike Sniper Safari, it has not triggered any formal investigations, underscoring how crucial hard evidence is to move beyond sensationalism and into prosecutorial action.
The IRMCT, still tasked with supporting national prosecutions and managing the ICTY archives, has signalled a willingness to share investigative dossiers with domestic authorities. The fresh testimonies could be folded into these dossiers, offering a new chain of command and potential foreign participants that align with the Mechanism’s goal of assisting national courts. However, the Mechanism’s capacity to launch fresh indictments hinges on the availability of forensic proof; the current lack of such data means any Hague‑based proceedings will likely remain limited to advisory support for Italy and Bosnia‑Herzegovina.
In Bosnia‑Herzegovina, the Italian probe has forced Sarajevo’s cantonal courts to confront a previously unexamined angle of the siege. Bosnian officials have pledged “full cooperation” with Milan, opening a channel for mutual legal assistance that could yield witness statements, archival documents, and perhaps spur new exhumations or ballistics analyses. Should forensic work finally materialise, it would give cantonal judges the concrete evidence needed to overcome the chronic resource constraints and political pressures that have hampered war‑crimes prosecutions for decades.
The saga of the “human‑safari” thus sits at a crossroads: powerful eyewitness accounts have finally pierced the veil of silence, but without the forensic backbone that courts demand, the path to justice remains precarious. The real test will be whether cross‑border investigators can translate these chilling testimonies into solid, admissible evidence—enough to hold foreign perpetrators accountable and to deliver a measure of closure to the survivors of Sarajevo’s darkest years.
Image Source: stockcake.com
